Citrix CloudPlatform 4.3 is Now Generally Available

Today, we are announcing the general availability of the latest release of Citrix’s industry-leading Apache CloudStack-based cloud infrastructure orchestration and provisioning platform, Citrix CloudPlatform 4.3.

We are always striving to provide our customers with the industry’s most agile, flexible, proven and open cloud orchestration, provisioning and management platform to support all types of business-critical workloads, including desktops, applications, cloud-native and server workloads.

With the release of Citrix CloudPlatform 4.3, we are delivering on the promise of the following key customer benefits:

User import from directory services through LDAP, Active Directory and Apache Directory Server, accelerated application and infrastructure provisioning and more agile and flexible scaling of workloads to increase quality of service (QoS) by enabling faster onboarding of users

Cloud-based workload provisioning to provide faster, more agile and efficient management and operations of XenDesktop and XenApp environments

Support for the most widely used storage technologies and protocols – Seamlessly orchestrate block, file and object storage irrespective of the underlying storage technologies and protocols

Industry-standard APIs – Expand interoperability with value-added solutions such as Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS), monitoring and capacity management. Industry APIs are the same as for Apache CloudStack and are compatible with Amazon Web Services EC2 and S3 APIs.

Intuitive User Account Management – Increase user satisfaction with a single sign-on experience and faster onboarding by leveraging the corporate directory (Active Directory, LDAP). New users can be mapped to a business unit in an enterprise or to a tenant in a service provider setting.

Support Desktop, Cloud-native, and Data Center Workloads

With the Citrix CloudPlatform 4.3 release, we enable customers to provision and orchestrate any type of workload, whether its desktop, applications, cloud-native or data center server workloads. It also enables the customization of the scale of compute offerings.

Delivery of desktop, application, cloud-native and datacenter infrastructure workloads – Orchestrate, provision and manage desktop, application, Web and datacenter infrastructure workloads. Support both traditional enterprise application workloads such as CRM and ERP applications and cloud-native scale-out workloads including social applications, big data and high-performance computing from a single cloud deployment.

Customize scale of compute offerings – Increase quality of service by allowing users to specify compute parameters including CPU speed, number of CPUs and memory, and dynamically scale up CPU and RAM for running VMs

Application-centric Isolation – Gain fine-grained control of the layers of applications by implementing advanced network isolation, port filtering and security groups to provide tenant isolation. Address country-specific compliance use cases where critical data must reside in regional databases by making it accessible only from select, restricted web servers.

Tenant-based Resource Dedication – Give tenants the benefits and security of private infrastructure by dedicating resources without having to provide the equivalent of an entire datacenter

Tiered services – Configure different service levels or tier service models by tagging compute or storage resources

Enterprise-grade, Advanced Cloud Networking – Create complex network topologies to support different types of application workloads. Leverage default network offerings right out of the box, or simply create multiple custom network offerings to differentiate classes of service, all on a single, multi-tenant, physical network.

Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) – Give enterprise applications the same level of enterprise-grade security as a traditional datacenter with a VPC. A VPC is a logically isolated part of Citrix CloudPlatform that can have its own admin-defined network topology resembling a traditional physical network.

Site-to-Site VPN and Remote Access VPN –Citrix CloudPlatform has enhanced the site-to-site VPN option to connect two virtual private clouds and remote access through a VPN client into the VPC.

Enterprise-grade Platform Resilience – Gain more control over Citrix CloudPlatform, a highly available platform that monitors its own network services and restarts automatically on failure while delivering the best SLAs for all applications. Adding two-way replication to the already redundant management databases further simplifies IT operations.

Cloud-native Scalability and Operations

The Citrix CloudPlatform 4.3 release provides enhanced support for cloud-native scalability and operations through the following capabilities: regions, object storage, simplified cloud management, cloud services and business management.

Simplified cloud management — Gain efficiency by centralizing the management of tens of thousands of geographically distributed servers from a single AJAX-based console implemented on top of the CloudStack API

Cloud services and business management — Enable additional functionalities such as account management, self-service provisioning, billing/charge-back and metering, and CRM and support ticketing through seamless integration with Citrix CloudPortal Business Manager